When hearing the phrase “stormy weather,” you might think of Lena Horne crooning the ballad from 1933. For those familiar with the history of yachting, however, the phrase calls up the magnificent yawl, Stormy Weather, designed and built by the young Olin Stephens and his brother Rod.

The winter of 1905 was a particularly harsh one for square-rigged ships sailing west from Europe ‘round Cape Horn. Claude Woollard, master mariner, writes in his book The Last of the Cape Horners, that “out of one hundred and thirty vessels which sailed from European ports to round Cape Horn, only fifty-two appeared to have reached their destination without mishap.

W. Starling Burgess was an American inventive genius whose design credentials include airplanes, machine guns, the Dymaxion car (with Buckminster Fuller) and, of course, some of the great J-boat defenders including Ranger (with the young Olin Stephens).

William F. Buckley’s enduring book, Airborne, ostensibly concerns the passage he and his cronies, including his son Christopher, made in 1975 from Miami to Spain via Bermuda and the Azores aboard Buckley’s boat Cyrano.